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7 n on the shoulders of odin i n the fall-winter of 1838–39 two events occurred that affected JeanMarie Odin. First, there was the unexpected death of a young confrere at the Barrens Seminary, Father Francis Simonin, on September 15, 1838.1 Then three months later came Timon and Llebaria’s excursion into Texas. The passing away of Father Simonin touched Odin deeply, but the Timon-Llebaria tour had a more lasting impact by changing his future as a missionary priest dramatically. The culmination of what Timon saw firsthand as the needs of Catholics in Texas during his trip to the Lone Star Republic, further refined by Bishop Blanc’s perceptions, ultimately resulted in Odin being uprooted from Missouri and transferred to Texas. In that land the missionary from France was to spend the majority of the remainder of his life. In reference to Father Simonin’s death, Odin wrote to Father Jean Baptiste Etienne, procurator general of the Congregation of the Mission in Paris, “It is with a heart filled with the most profound grief that I announce the severe loss which our mission of America has suffered. . . . Providence has just exacted of us a very great sacrifice. On the 15th of this month, we had the misfortune to lose our confrere Fr. Francis Simonin, after an illness of seven weeks. All hearts were attached to him here because of his good spirit and noble manners, both engaging and affable.”2 Father Simonin, a young French Vincentian born in 1810 at St. Vincent de Boisset, Canton of Perreux, Department of Loire, appeared to be one of the bright lights on the horizon for the US Congregation of the Mission. Odin’s letter to Etienne expressed with real emotion the bereavement that he and his fellow Vincentians on the Missouri frontier felt. The jaunt into Texas of Fathers Timon and Llebaria came while Odin was still trying to recover from the loss of his colleague Simonin. Timon and Llebaria spent most of their days in Texas at Galveston and Houston or traveling between the two settlements. Leading Catholic personages of the new republic whom the Vincentians met at Houston dissuaded the two churchmen from journeying farther inland, pleading inclement weather as well as the presence of marauding Comanches in the area, both situations | 60 | c h a p t e r 7 posing serious threats to the missionaries’ safety.3 Had Timon and Llebaria been able to expand the trip to include territories to the west and south of Houston toward San Antonio de Bexar, they would have seen firsthand the sad conditions of catechesis in that most historic and significant of all of Texas’ Catholic municipalities and the location of five eighteenth-century Franciscan missions. But Father Timon’s decision that he and his Spanish confrere not continue beyond Houston made sense.The dangers were truly menacing. Besides, those same men who made the warnings were able to summarize for Timon and Llebaria what seemed to be in their views Catholicism’s situation in Texas at the time. Those men represented both the Spanish-Mexican legacy of Texas as well as the growing Catholic immigrant presence. Those citizens, moreover, were among the most respectable in Texas. Foremost among them were Juan Nepomuceno Seguín, state senator from San Antonio de Bexar; Judge John Dunn, senator from Goliad, Refugio, and San Patricio; James Kerr, representative from Jackson; José Antonio Navarro, also from San Antonio de Bexar; and John Joseph Linn himself from Victoria.4 The Catholic Texas demography that these people represented and knew only too well was unique. It was a population that had developed originally in a frontier region evangelized through the influence of the Spanish and Mexican Catholic culture that had been carried north from the Valley of Mexico and offered to some of the indigenous peoples of Texas. By the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, that original Catholic identity had begun to knead with a non-Hispanic Catholic religiosity entering Texas from the United States and Europe. Whoever ultimately was assigned to the Lone Star Republic to shore up the faith there eventually would have to understand the nature of the challenge to evangelization that such an ethnically and religiously diverse demographic region offered. The Catholics at Houston who advised Father Timon of the status of the church in Texas brought to his attention the problems existing in San Antonio de Bexar that weakened Catholic life there. The Houston Catholics reported...

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